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LCM Research Slam!

I’m WAY behind on my posts, and have a backlog of important things I’ve been meaning to write about, but one thing I MUST advertise now is the annual Literature.Culture.Media Center Research Slam. It’ll be held tomorrow at UCSB, in the English Department. It was also advertised on the Digital Humanities SoCal Blog, and we’ll have some exciting presenters from various institutions utilizing a variety of media.

I’ll be presenting a project on social networks and mobility (to sum into as few words as possible) in the travelogue and memoir Catfish and Mandala: A Two-Wheeled Journey Through the Landscape and Memory of Vietnam, by Vietnamese American author Andrew X. Pham. It’s a lovely book. Poignant, funny, beautiful, and quite underrated among Asian American texts, it’s an incredible personal narrative that offers an astute look at mobility to and within Vietnam and the different networks that affect how an individual, namely a Viet-kieu (overseas Vietnamese), experiences Vietnam and its people.

This media based project (mainly using geographic maps and social network diagrams) will be the basis of another presentation that I’ll be making at the American Literature Association next week in San Francisco on a panel entitled “Travel in Times of Travail.” Hopefully, I can pull this off!

Images and visualization to follow once I’ve gotten some feedback!

**Also, I was presently surprised this morning when I got to campus and found that an examiners copy of an unsolicited book arrived in the mail for me today… and it was co-authored by my mentor from Cal State Uni San Marcos, Susie Lan Cassel! So, for anyone interested in a writing textbook with a heavy emphasis on thesis construction: Techniques for College Writing: The Thesis Statement and Beyond. I believe the paperback version will be out in 2011 (since that’s what the copyright says). **